[Columbine]

The main thing that bothers me with the whole child-model photobooks, U15 idol genre, is that when I was in japan, I only ever saw it in two places- one was in a shop down-town that sold a variety of idol books, but also quite a lot of the posey-sexy pin-up sort and out and out still-porn. Never mind the seedy DVDs. The other was in a vending machine not so far from my friends apartment. The bottom row was U15 photobooks, the rest was...not. Not advertised as porn, maybe, but it's not unheard of for the industry to shake hands with it.

Ok, I can accept that the books themselves are relatively innocent; they aren't explicitly marketed as porn, some publications are clearly seedier than others, I do see -some- of Nyororin's points, and OK, I get that Japanese culture is geared differently and porn rubs shoulders with a lot of things with any kind of fan-base and that's socially A-OK, but... should photos of little kids really be in there too? And it does seem to be aimed predominantly at men, so the idea makes me really uncomfortable.

It could equally be argued that swimsuits and gym clothes are standard child clothing and they aren't any more revealing than they might wear in public anyway, but neither would most parents allow unrelated men they don't know to pay to view their child in those clothes.

Whatever is said (quite rightly) that the child is not exposed to any -direct- harm, you are still effectively selling their image to a fan-base which, statistically and given it's commercial selling point, is more likely to comprise of a higher percentage of pedophiles than other consumer groups. I can't really say I think that's fair on the child- they have no chance to give proper informed consent until long after the fact. I can't say I'd want to grow up and realize "Jeeze, when I was 8, I was probably some pedophile's pin-up...".

Also who's to say the parents ~are~ protective? Most abuse cases are by close relatives, or perhaps the parents come into it naively and are then pressured into agreeing beyond what they originally intended to agree to, even by a small degree. I don't know how the industry is regulated, but if some of the photo's out there are truly as awful as GoNative says, then it's clearly not enough.

And I kind of disagree that "the biggest difference between a child modeling a swimsuit in a clothing catalog and in a magazine is mostly the angle of the photo and the poses they choose to use." The biggest difference is that the clothing catalog is only trying to sell the swimsuit- the magazine will sell the child.